The Colonizer and the Colonized

It is difficult to discern the motive behind the republication of Albert Memmi’s classic examination of the political psychology of colonialism. The illustration on the front of this new edition is clearly of white US troops looking down imperiously from their armoured vehicle over a black society, probably Somalia. If the choice of image seeks to suggest that contemporary US interventions are a modern expression of the colonial condition Memmi sought to explore in 1957, with its then sharp contemporaneity yet heavy historical burden, this is clearly mistaken.